The Religious Life of LondonRitchie, J. Ewing (James Ewing)
Religion
The Religious Life of London
Ritchie, J. Ewing (James Ewing)
London (England) -- Religion; Religious thought -- England -- London
hundred may be collected together, the majority, of course, males,
chiefly of the lower section, I should imagine, of the middle class.
There is music; then the Doctor reads a chapter of the Bible, and takes
it to pieces; then there is more music; then a prayer, and a half-hour’s
sermon, from a regular text, according to the fashion of the orthodox,
but generally coming to a very unorthodox conclusion. Indeed, the former
come off hardly at the Doctor’s hands. He demolished them as easily as
if they were so many men of straw; President Edwards, Richard Baxter, Mr.
Spurgeon, the apostles, and their great Teacher, all look very small by
the side of the clear, logical, learned, fluent, sarcastic, infallible
Doctor, who is the heir of all the ages under the sun; who talks of
Zoroaster, and Vedas, and Shasters; who is as familiar with Brahma and
Buddha as if he had assisted at their birth, and who knows what’s o’clock
in Sanscrit better than you or I, my good sir, in ordinary English.
After the sermon comes the collection, and the congregational
dinner-hour, for the sale of the beer for which, the neighbouring publics
open just as the Independent Religious Reformers, exhausted by the
Doctor’s omniscience, require the refreshing fluid.
“Hae, sirs!” said an elderly female in a remote part of Scotland, as for
the first time she saw a black man; “hae, sirs, what canna be done for
the penny!” Assuredly some such feeling must be entertained by the
listener who for the first time hears Dr. Perfitt in his rostrum in
Cambridge Hall. For a pound a year you may have this pleasure every
Sunday, and become one of the Independent Reformers. What more can man
desire?
SOUTH PLACE, FINSBURY SQUARE.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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